Electric Vehicle Smart Charging Station

Itron’s Smart Charging Station is the product of our partnership with ClipperCreek. We’ve leveraged their industry-leading CS-Series charging stations to deliver the industry’s first utility-integrated smart charging solution. 

As a sensing application, Itron equips each 240 V charging station with revenue-grade metrology, ZigBee Smart Energy communications, and a full-featured Wi-Fi access point. 

Itron's EV sensing application also integrates charging stations into Itron’s OpenWay® network, allowing utilities to extend smart grid intelligence to electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

Itron's EV sensing application facilitates collaboration between residential EV owners, local utilities and public charging station service providers. By connecting electric usage and vehicle usage patterns to both consumers and smart meters, opportunities to incent off-peak charging and apply vehicle-specific tariffs are enabled.

 Smart charging also brings EV owners into full participation in utility demand response events.

A consumer-owned charging station with the Itron EV sensing application allows the consumer to receive financial incentives from a local utility, while the utility benefits from insight into charging patterns that impact the electrical grid, as well as the impact of programs targeted at the consumer to shift charging to off-peak periods, or reduce the charging rate during certain times. 

This illustrates the collaborative networking potential of sensing applications. When energy usage patterns are clearly understood by both utilities and consumers, financial opportunities can be created for mutual benefit.

All OpenWay meter form factors and communications technologies (RF Mesh or cellular) support a ZigBee Smart Energy interface for demand response and sub-metering. 

With embedded ZigBee technology, the Itron Smart Charging Station has the same capabilities. For instance, utilities can offer dynamic pricing, consumer engagement and demand response programs to electric vehicles.

The same OpenWay sub-metering interface used for Itron’s 2.4 GZ gas meter modules is also used to collect register data and hourly interval data from the Smart Charging Station. This enables AMI networks to collect billing-grade metering data. 

Whether a utility offers an EV-specific tariff, or simply wants to do load research on EVs in their territory, this product leverages OpenWay communications to extract more value from existing infrastructure.